UVA DIRECTOR OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION PROGRAM: ANDY JOHNSTON

Andrew Johnston, Ph.D. has been appointed Associate Professor and Director of the UVA School of Architecture’s Historic Preservation program. The appointment to the Department of Architectural History, with a three year courtesy appointment to the Department of Architecture, was effective December 15, 2015.

Johnston’s research interests focus on industrial and infrastructure heritage, cultural landscapes, and, specifically, heritage and preservation in China. He was the founding program director of both the Master of Architecture and the Interdisciplinary MSc in Urban Design, an English language, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) - accredited program at Xian-Jiaotong Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou, China, where he also held the Heritage, History and Theory Research Initiative Chair. He has worked extensively on the promotion of multidisciplinary research sharing, and interdisciplinary programs at XJTLU, and as the Suzhou Institute of Architectural Design’s Consulting Architect in Heritage Preservation. In the United States, he has been an environmental planner for the California Department of Transportation and the Supervisory Architect for the U.S. National Park Service’s Historic American Engineering Record.

Johnston holds a Ph.D. and Masters of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master of Science in Urban Design from the Pratt Institute. He is a licensed architect with the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and a certified planner with the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). His most recent publication, Mercury and the Making of California: Mining, Landscape and Race, 1845-1900, is a multidisciplinary examination of the history and cultural landscapes of California's mercury-mining industry, which raises mercury to its rightful place alongside gold and silver in the development of the American West.